Day tripping, the European Way

Sometimes I like to walk out my front door, into the street, and onto a train heading to an unknown destination. For someone like me, who does not own a car and cannot simply step on the gas and go, it’s a way to disconnect from daily life and immerse myself in the unknown.

To aid me in this venture, I can count on the SNCF, the Société nationale des chemins de fer français, the French national rail service. A pop-up appears on my computer screen, a flash sale demanding immediate attention: act now or pass up an incredible deal. I click, study a list of destinations, choose somewhere I’ve never been before, and buy.

Then, uplifted by my recent purchase, I return to the everyday drudgery of life in front of a screen, secure in the knowledge that not too far down the line new horizons are awaiting me.

Only a week ago, I got up early on a dark, damp Saturday morning and headed to Gare du Nord, the Parisian train station to all points north, the biggest train station in Europe and the second biggest in the world.

Inside the station, it was a very dreary scene. The homeless, slumped against walls and in dark corners, were just beginning to stir. The station’s mice were active too, exploring overflowing trash bags that clean-up crews had not yet removed. I joined a line of early-morning travelers about to undergo a security check. That done, I climbed on the train to Amsterdam.

But that’s not where I was going. Before reaching its final destination, it would make a stop in Antwerp, Belgium, and that’s where I was getting off.

My primary motivation was ignorance—my own—and a desire to put an end to it. I knew a little about Antwerp. I knew it was a place for buying and selling diamonds. I knew too that the painters Rubens and Van Dyck had lived there in the 17th century during the city’s golden age. I knew it was an important port and that the city’s inhabitants spoke Flemish. Upon arrival, I didn’t know much else.

Inside the station, a magnificent building inaugurated in 1905, I asked for a map and headed outside. In the distance towered a lacy steeple. It belonged to Our Lady of Antwerp, the city’s cathedral whose threshold I would cross later that day.

I chose the steeple as my guide toward the city center, but then I got sidetracked. That’s the kind of traveler I am, a bad companion for those who like to stick to a program of things to do and see. I like to wander, get lost, and end up where I had no intention of going in the first place.

That’s exactly what happened to me in Antwerp, a wrong turn that turned out to be a stroke of luck because I ended up on Vrijdagmarkt, Friday Market. At one corner of that square stands the Plantin-Moretus Museum, home to one of the world’s first industrial printing houses and two of the oldest printing presses in existence today. I said to myself, this is something to see, and went inside.

Until the late 19th century, the museum was also the family home and the workplace of descendents of Christophe Plantin, founder in 1576 of the Gulden Passer, The Golden Compass Printing House. Until its closing in 1876, when it was turned over to the Belgian state as a museum, the Plantin-Moretus family lived and worked in the large but compact building where, for their workers and themselves, nights were short and days were long.

Once inside, visitors can pass directly from the family’s formal dining room whose walls are lined with family portraits, some painted by Rubens and Van Dyck, into the proof-reading rooms, offices, studies, a 17th century bookshop, and a print shop with seven presses that could produce 1,250 pages during a standard 14-hour workday. There are also ten tons of handmade moveable lead type, produced on the premises in the family’s foundry, and on one of the upper floors, the family library, which includes 638 rare manuscripts.

I’ll admit I’d never been to a place like this before. Though it calls itself a museum, the Plantin-Moretus Prentenkabinet feels a lot more like a workplace where everyone has just stepped out for lunch and at any moment, they’ll be back: Proofreaders seated at tables flooded with natural light, pouring over galleys straight off the press; compositors in the print shop setting the page, preparing it to be inked and “pressed” onto paper, very physical labor that requires flexibility and a good strong back.

In the study, its walls lined with fine Spanish leather, the 17th Humanist Justus Lipsius may be at work, in the space the family has provided for him to study, write and consult the thousands of works in the family library. His own complete works will be printed by Jan Moretus, the son-in-law of Christophe Plantin. And surely customers are standing at the counter in the bookshop, hoping to finger some of the leather-bound books produced at the Gulden Passer.

On this damp February day, there are few visitors and the museum is silent. Yet the air is alive with potential, as if the accumulation of centuries of love and care for the printed word could suddenly set the entire place ablaze with its former bustling activity.

Christophe Plantin had a motto: Labore et Constantia, by work and perseverance. For three centuries, for the Plantin-Moretus family, work and perseverance were enough. But in the mid-19th century, they refused to modernize: no rotary press, no photogravure, no linotype. The Gulden Passer remained frozen in time and progress passed it by.

In part, that is why the museum seems so alive today. Concentrating on their work, the printers missed out on a revolution. They may have loved their craft too well to care or to change.

After my visit to the Plantin-Moretus Museum, my time in Antwerp was almost up. I ran through the city, absorbing the sights at high speed, and didn’t even have time for some of those famous Belgian fries served with a dollop of mayonnaise.

Back on the train, I gazed at the night and felt a little less ignorant than at the start of my day. Then I dozed and dreamt, carried back to the time when the rush and clatter of the presses of The Pottsville Republican could still be heard on Mahantongo Street.

A new house in France that’s a bit like home

While on Saturday, January 23rd, two feet of snow was falling on Schuylkill County and most county residents were staying inside, on other side of the Atlantic, I was out and about in the damp and cold, hours before dawn broke over France.

It was a big day for me. In fact, I’ve had a lot of big days recently and I’ve chosen this Sunday to let readers in on some news: in October, I bought myself a country home.

Some of you may have read Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, a book which has spawned an entire industry about ex-pats wrestling with the locals in villages all over France, trying to fit in, trying to find a good plumber, trying to penetrate the minds of the inscrutable French.

I don’t qualify as an ex-pat. I’ve been here too long (I’ll be celebrating my 30th anniversary of French life in a year), I work for the French government (can you get more “inside” than that?), and I’ve become one of them, as I now have both French and American nationalities (my first impulse remains to say I’m American though after all these years, my identity floats somewhere over the Atlantic, torn between two continents).

Nor are the French a mystery to me: I live with them, I work with them. Why, some of my dearest friends in the world are French! And so far so good when it comes to finding a plumber, which brings me back to the subject of my house.

It all started last summer. Paris was caught in a heat wave, and my small apartment was hot and oppressive. If I opened all the windows, it was like living in the middle of a freeway. If I closed them, it was too stuffy to breathe. My nearby park, Buttes Chaumont, beckoned but I was chained to my computer, working under a deadline to finish several translations for a company marketing funeral services.

I worked with the blinds down and the curtains drawn to keep out the sun and heat. The atmosphere was dark and dreary, the air, hard to breathe—a little big like being buried alive.

To escape from preneed contracts and funeral fashions, at the end of each work day, I got into the habit of exploring real estate listings on line, dreaming about homes deep in the French countryside or along the sea. I insist on the word “dreaming” because, as I dreamed, I had no intention to buy.

Then it happened. While I was “visiting la Côte opale,” a long stretch of beach in northern France extending to the Belgium border, a pop-up appeared on my screen. It had nothing to do with the North Sea or the English Channel, the
area of my "visit." It was inland and in a completely different part of the country, a corner of France I did not know.

I read the listing, I looked at the photo gallery, I looked at the price. I also noticed a message saying the owner would be at the house, generally uninhabited, till the end of the week. On a whim, I called the number on the screen.

Two days later I was in a train heading west towards the lowest point of Basse Normandie, lower Normandy. First we crossed the suburbs of Paris, then we arrived in the city of Chartres, whose beautiful cathedral dominated the skyline as we crossed the Beauce, a vast plateau, for centuries the breadbasket of France.

I am a Pottsville girl. I do not feel at home on the plain. I need mountains, valleys, rolling hills and hollows, Pennsylvania, in other words. I was dismayed by what I was seeing from my seat. If the house was in one of these villages plopped down in the middle of the plain, there was no chance I would go for it.

The train kept chugging towards its destination (it was a local, stopping at every town and village, not a high speed TGV) when suddenly everything changed: rolling hills, forests, valleys, summer fields of green, villages nestled in hollows, something that looked like home to me.

I got off the train at the village of Condé sur Huisne (now try to pronounce that one!), with a population of 1,343, a village church on the main square, a post office, two bakeries, a pharmacy, a café, a small supermarket, and two restaurants. I walked from the train to the house, right off the main square. The front door was open. I walked inside. I was charmed.

When I got back on the train in the late afternoon, I had already been to the notary’s office with the owner and her daughter. The papers for the sale were drawn up. The next step would be for me to sign a “promise to buy” and return it to the notary with a binder. That was in late July. By the end of October, the home was mine.

You may be asking, so what is it like, this new house of yours?

To begin, let’s say it has a lot of potential, a way of saying it needs a lot of work. The house was built around 1850. The walls are thick, some are crumbling, and the red-tile roof must be replaced. In the living room, which has a big fireplace, the floor is covered with beautiful terra-cotta tiles of the kind traditional to the region, and these are originals. There’s one small problem, though. Beneath them, the beams are rotting and, if I don’t have them replaced, the floor will collapse. And that’s just the beginning…

But I repeat, this house has potential. Everyone who has visited tells me so. Out back there’s about 3,000 ft² of garden, and that garden has a cherry, a hazelnut and a boxwood tree over one hundred years old. Next door, there are open fields where horses graze, in the distance, wooded hills, and at the edge of the village, a river called the Huisne.

Yesterday, a contractor who has done work for me in Paris met me at the house. That’s why I was out before dawn, to catch the first train of the day. I’m hoping he will transform the inside of my house, as he has transformed my apartment in Paris. Work on the roof begins next week. A local contractor will be doing the job. Perhaps by summer, I’ll have a home.

Dear readers, I think you’ll be hearing more about this. Today, I show you some photos of “before” work begins. I’ll keep you posted as things progress, and as we discover together a beautiful region of France called “le Perche.”

"High tech" then and now: Julia Margaret Cameron and the art of photography

Christmas is over, the gifts have been opened, the wrapping paper thrown in the trash. I’m ready to bet that some readers got a new tablet or pad, a new smartphone or some other electronic device. If Santa was feeling less generous, or if you were not so very good, you may have only received a selfie stick or a case for your cell phone.

For those readers who spent Christmas day surrounded by grandchildren, I invite you to think back to Christmas fifty years ago. That year too, there was a “high-tech” gift on many wish lists. We were hoping for a Polaroid Swinger, an instant camera that squeezed out, in a minute flat, the photo we just snapped.

I was one of the lucky ones, I found a Swinger under the Christmas tree that year, and my sisters and I spent our Christmas day snapping our recently acquired poodle, the first dog we’d ever had.

The photos were small, bad and fascinating. Sometimes they were streaky, sometimes sprinkled with white spots, or only partially developed, leaving half the photo blank, looking as if it had been ripped in two. Also, there was that distinctive chemical smell and often, if we were too hasty in handling our photo, we left the smudge of our fingertips.

My father had a small motion-picture camera, we also had a Kodak Brownie, but the camera my sisters and I loved best was the Swinger because using it, we felt in control and got instant results.

As I write, if I turn my head, I see a group of adolescents in the street below. They’re taking group selfies. No sooner is the photo snapped, they crowd together to see the result. I’m not sure they’d have the patience to wait the minute it used to take for the Swinger to place a finished photo in our hands.

Fifty years ago, we “met” the Swinger (some of you may remember the ad with Ali McGraw and the $19.95 price tag). If we go back one hundred years more, we arrive at a period when photography was an extremely demanding craft and an emerging art form.

In early December, while in England to visit a friend, this was brought home to me in an “electrifying and delightful way” (to use the words of the photographer whose work I went to see) at an exhibit at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, the British museum of art and design. The photographer is Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), one of the 19th century’s greatest and among the first to understand that photography is art.

Julia Margaret Cameron, who was born in Calcutta, was introduced to the very new process of photography in 1842 by the English astronomer Sir John Herschel when they met in South Africa, where Herschel was surveying the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. Cameron became interested in the process and followed its developments, but it was not until 1863 that she received her first camera.

Two years later, this extraordinary woman, whose enthusiasm for photography was equaled only by the confidence she placed in herself and her art, had her first “one-woman” show in the South Kensington Museum, later renamed the Victoria & Albert. In 1868, the museum’s director assigned her two rooms to use as a portrait studio, making her the museum’s first “artist-in-residence.”

Cameron photographed many of the greats of her day, her friend the astronomer Herschel, Charles Darwin, and the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, her neighbor on the Isle of Wight, where she and her husband settled upon their return from India.

On that island off the south coast of England, Cameron began her first experiments, taking pictures of her famous neighbor, but also of island children, her family and her maids.

From the start, Cameron conceived of her work as art and sought to “combine the real and the Ideal.” She did not document events, as did her American contemporary Mathew Brady. On the other side of the Atlantic, he was revolutionizing photography in his way as he created the profession of photojournalist through his documentation of the bloody reality of the Civil War.

Cameron preferred historical, allegorical or biblical scenes. She composed her photographs as if they were paintings. In fact, her series of portraits of Virgin and Child are inspired by the Renaissance masterpieces of Raphael. Her photographs also illustrated some of Tennyson’s narrative poems, such as his retelling of the tale of King Arthur.

Yet, Cameron’s particular genius does not concern what she chose to photograph. Her innovations were technical and in her day, she was criticized for her unconventional techniques. In one article, I could never do them justice nor would I know how to explain them well. However, to give readers an idea of what it meant to take a photo in those days, I include this link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eastman/sfeature/wetplate_step1.html

On this PBS site, you can learn the eight steps of the collodion process of photography that used wet glass plates the same size as the final print. Cameron’s photographs are quite large, meaning she used fragile glass plates of the same size, coating them with several substances before finally producing a photograph. To arrive at a final print, patience, knowledge of chemistry, and some luck were involved.

Often, the final result contained “flaws.” Cameron’s genius was to recognize them as art. The substances coating the plate often turned into swirls or smears in the print. Scratches might also appear; there could even be the smudge of a fingertip. For Cameron, they were part of the process and an ingredient of her art.

In the end, each of her photos was a “hand-made” object, a print containing the imprint of the artist’s unique personality.

Pottsville photographer George Bretz used the same process as Cameron when in 1884, he was hired by the Smithsonian Institute to document the Kohinoor Mine at the Shenandoah Colliery. His were the first photo shoots underground and his photos, the first of the underground workings of a mine, opening a new era in mine photography.

How many of us today would have the patience to work like Cameron or Bretz? Their techniques belong to the past; their patience may as well—something to think about in 2016.

On that note, I wish all my readers a happy, healthy new year. I look forward to “meeting” you again in 2016 for our seventh year together.

Being thankful at Thanksgiving

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday but one I have not celebrated for years. That day, I got up, got dressed, and went out. I went down into the metro, changed trains twice, and rode to the last stop of line 13, Saint-Denis Université.

The trains were crowded, as usual, especially on the line 13, where we travelled cheek-to-cheek. I looked around me, sizing up the other passengers, and noticed they were doing the same.

Since November 13th, we’re on edge when we’re trapped underground in trains or crowded corridors. Nearly every day, sometimes more than once a day, there are announcements on the information panels in every metro station: colis suspect, suspicious package, traffic slowed or stopped on one of the system’s 16 lines or on one of the several train routes that link the suburbs to the capital. So far, so good, no “suspicious package” has been anything more than that.

Yes, trains remain crowded because most of us have no choice. We cannot do without the metro to get to work. Yet there is definitely more traffic above ground. When I stand at the bus stop near my home, I watch the cars go by and, in many, notice a woman at the wheel, alone. On the Monday following the Friday the 13th attack, there were record traffic jams in and around Paris.

I’ve talked with my students about the “event” that has changed our lives, especially as the university where we work and study, Université Paris 8, is located in Saint-Denis, the town where the police tracked and killed three terrorists involved in the November 13th attacks. On November 18th, the day of the police raid on the terrorist hideout, the university was closed. The next day, we were all back at work.

As for my students, I am impressed by their courage and their ability to “be themselves.” In class, we talked and laughed. Some students spoke of their experiences. A young man was in attendance at the soccer match between the national teams of France and Germany on November 13th. He heard the explosions but, with all the other spectators, stayed till the end of the match. This same student had been at a concert at the Bataclan Theater the night before the attacks. Students emphasized this is a place where they like to go, underlining that, this time, terrorists targeted the young.

A young woman told us she went shopping in Paris the day the university was closed. While in a woman’s clothing boutique, she saw the police arrive and they told everyone to stay inside: another “colis suspect,” this one in the street outside the shop. True to the calm fortitude of all my students, she kept her cool and comforted others, more surprised than anything else by the reactions of the women around her: they cried, sobbed and made desperate phone calls to their families.

This young woman, French with family roots in Algeria, told us another story. During Algeria’s civil war in the 1990’s, with its official death toll of 150,000, civilians for the most part, her uncle set out to pay a visit to friends. When he knocked on their door, no one answered. He was expected, so he turned the knob and stepped inside to discover the entire family, husband, wife and children, dead in a pool of blood.

There are other stories like that in Yasmine’s family, which may help explain why she remained calm and provided comfort to others during the brief half-hour she spent as a prisoner of a clothing boutique.

If my students remain strong in the face of the great uncertainty facing us here in Paris (will there be another attack, where, when, who will be the victims?), it may be that they feel thankful to be alive, capable of enjoying life, simply getting on with it. As I look out at my class, I see young French men and women; at the same time I see the world.

I have students whose parents were born in Mali or Senegal, the Republic of the Congo or Cameroon, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Pakistan, India, Thailand or China; within Europe, in Croatia, Serbia or Macedonia, Portugal or Spain. Many are Muslim, a few are Jewish, there are evangelical Christians and Catholics, and also atheists and agnostics, of which there are many in France.

In recent weeks, US presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for closing down mosques and for creating national identity cards indicating a citizen’s religious affiliation (we all know who is being targeted here). Based on my students’ family names, I would say many of them are probably Muslim, but the students themselves are typical French young people, eager to learn and live life to the fullest.

Should they—or their American counterparts—be stigmatized for their religion? It is neither the French nor the American way.

Since November 13, 2015, France’s “Black Friday” (I’ll admit, I’ve always hated the name of that buying frenzy that immediately follows America’s only official holiday that resists being commercialized), France has been controlling its borders and encouraging other European countries to put in place stricter controls by the end of the year.

Some, such as Serbia and Macedonia, have taken the lead. As refugees continue to flow into Europe, those two countries are allowing only Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians to pass.

These past few days, I’ve been asking myself, “what about us?”—what about us Parisians? Who would take us in if we had to flee?

Perhaps we could turn to Lebanon. This multi-confessional country, where Christians, Muslims and some Jews live together, all be it with some difficulty, will have taken in almost 2 million Syrian refugees by the end of 2015, a third of its total population. For France, this would be the equivalent of 22 million, for the US, over 100 million!

This small country houses its refugees and does its best to place all refugee children in schools, where they share classrooms with Lebanese children. The generosity of its citizens, of all confessions, has been exemplary and we could all learn a lot from them.

For me, this year on Thanksgiving, there was no turkey, no stuffing, no pumpkin pie, but I’m thankful. I’m thankful for the religious freedom that exists in the France and the US. I’m thankful for the delicious fresh food and bread I eat every day. Mostly, I’m thankful to be alive.

Marc Chagall - The Triumph of Music "burns like the sun"

Winter has descended early on Paris, a leaden sky blocking out the sun, enclosing us in a world of damp and cold. A fine drizzle hangs in the air, sidewalks are gritty with rain and soot. This morning at my neighborhood outdoor market, the butcher told me he could smell snow in the air.

To escape the six months of cold and damp that have settled in, we Parisians have different options: a privileged few can head south to the Mediterranean; the rest of us root out winter coats and woolen scarves.

In my case, last Friday, dressed in a down jacket, umbrella in hand, I stepped outside, headed down a steep hill and walked to the eastern limit of my neighborhood, home to the new Paris Philharmonic, inaugurated in January 2015.

At first glance, this imposing structure hardly resembles a source of relief from gloom. Seen from afar, it looks like a giant, molten German steel helmet fallen from the sky. Up close, well, it still looks like a German steel helmet, but flocks of birds, some plunging, some swooping upwards, emerge from the façade. They are there, obviously, to symbolize music, but they remind me a bit of Hitchcock’s film “The Birds.”

Happily, hidden beneath this mass of metal, beneath the lip of an immense balcony at the level of the concert hall, there is an exhibition space and within that space, there is light, color, music, love and joy. In a word, there is Chagall.

From October 13 until January 31st, 2016, the Paris Philharmonic is presenting the exhibit “Marc Chagall, The Triumph of Music.”

Chagall, who lived to be 98, dying at the end of a normal workday spent in his studio, experienced the major upheavals and horrors of the 20th century. Born in 1887 in Vitebsk, a city in today’s Belarus and at that time a part of the Russian Empire, Chagall, raised in a family of Hassidic Jews, went on to become a citizen of the world.

He studied painting in Saint Petersburg, painted in Paris, Berlin, Mexico and New York, where he fled to escape Hitler’s persecution of Jews, and finally returned to Europe. In the South of France, he captured that region’s vibrant, radiant color in all his works: paintings, drawings, collages, book illustrations, costumes, stage settings, a painting for the foyer of the Frankfurt Opera, the ceiling of Opera Garnier in Paris, monumental panels for the Met in New York.

At the Philharmonic exhibit, the place of honor is given to Chagall’s work for the theater, beginning with the monumental ceiling he was commissioned to paint for the Paris Opera in 1963. This 220 m² circular work, which it took the 77-year-old artist a year to complete, is a celebration of operatic music, where figures of opera and ballet circle high above theater-goers’ heads.

At the exhibit, these figures are brought “down to our level” thanks to a projection created by the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. We can see the details of Chagall’s depiction of Carmen, the ballerinas of Swan Lake, or the painter himself, palette in hand, the maestro of this vast scenic opera.

Impressive as this projection may be, with its musical accompaniment corresponding to the details of the 14 operas and ballets Chagall represented, it is not nearly as interesting as the preparatory work on view.

In drawings, paintings and collages, we discover how Chagall worked: how he began with swatches of bright color, how figures and themes emerged, how affinities were created, and finally, how all the details of his composition resonate together. Through the shock of color and visual rhythm, this painter-composer builds a bridge between music, color and form.

We can also see Chagall at work, thank to Izis, a Franco-Lithuanian photographer who followed the unfolding of his work for the Paris and New York Operas. Crouched on his knees, brush in hand, how small the artist looks, yet at no time do we lose sight of the enormous creative vitality that inhabited Marc Chagall all his life.

The exhibit follows a reverse chronological order, beginning with the decors for the Paris and New York operas in the 1960’s, ending with the artist’s work for the Moscow State Jewish Theater soon after its creation in 1919. After discovering the monumental decors, we participate in the creation of the costumes and stage sets Chagall created for operas and ballets.

For a 1967 production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at the Met, the costumes are wonderfully inventive, each one a work of art in itself, an integral part of the characters’ story, a complement to their voice and song. And once again, we get to see preparatory sketches to better understand how Chagall’s work emerged.

We can also view black-and-white videos of the 1967 production. In this case, the absence of color brought home to me the artist’s brilliant capacity to merge with Mozart’s music and totally inhabit the theater with his work.

From the start, in all media, music triumphs in Marc Chagall’s creations. We see this in his settings and costumes for Stravinsky’s “Firebird” at the Met in 1945 or for the ballet “Aleko,” based on the music of Tchaikovsky, which premiered in Mexico City in 1942. Of the stage settings for this production, Chagall’s wife Bella wrote, “Chagall’s decors burn like the sun in the heavens.”

In the panels he painted in 1920 for the Moscow State Jewish Theater, Chagall melds tradition and the avant-garde, celebrating the joy of the Hassidic music and dance of his youth while using cubist forms and experimenting with color.

I first discovered Chagall’s work as an adolescent, in all places, on the street where I lived. Our neighbor was Mr. Sol Wolf, an avid collector of modern Jewish art, with a fine collection in his home. Mr. Wolf and his wife Dorothy took me to art exhibits, lent me art books and introduced me to the enormous pleasure of enjoying art at home. They also introduced me to Chagall.

At the Philharmonic, I discovered him as never before, an artist full of life, love and joy, whose work blazes even on the darkest of Parisian days.

Migration and Immigration, US and Europe, then and now

When I was a child, my mother took my two sisters and me to Sunday School every Sunday at the United Church of Christ in Pottsville. We all sang in the children’s choir and we loved our choir director, Mrs. Dorothy Loy.

Not only did we sing each week during the Sunday School service and once a month in the main sanctuary, we put on a yearly extravaganza, a performance somewhere between a Broadway show and a sing-along around the campfire. We sold tickets to the show and played to a packed house, using the proceeds to pay for choir outings to Washington, D.C. or, most memorably, the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

I remember singing “Umiak Kayak, Mukluk, Tupik,” a song of “Eskimo words,” and “Second-hand Rose,” a 1921 Ziegfeld Follies hit popularized by Barbara Streisand in “Funny Girl.”

We also sang Irving Berlin’s musical rendition of “The New Colossus,” the 1883 sonnet by Emma Lazarus, engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

As children, we were very moved by that song. It swells like a wave, constantly gaining in force, but then, almost miraculously, breaks gently on a welcoming shore. Lady Liberty gathers in her children and protects them from the storm.

Emma Lazarus’s poem was engraved on the statue’s base in 1903. One year earlier, during “the Great Strike of 1902” that lasted 163 days and affected the entire anthracite region, newly arrived immigrants were transported directly from Ellis Island to the mines. Escorted by the Coal and Iron Police, these men who spoke no English went to work as “scabs,” which earned them the lasting hatred of their new neighbors, striking miners fighting for a better life.

A few years earlier, on September 10, 1897, in Lattimer, PA, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak, and Ukrainian immigrants organized a protest against unfair working conditions in mines near Hazleton. By the end of that day, nineteen of them were dead, shot by members of the Pennsylvania State Militia.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, thus went the life of immigrants. And for many, Lady Liberty’s promise went unfulfilled.

In 1924, President Coolidge signed the National Origins Act, the United States’ first comprehensive immigration law whose goal was the preservation of “national homogeneity.” Already in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all Chinese immigration, but the new law of 1924 created numerical limitations for all countries and set up a racial and national hierarchy. In other words, severe limitations were placed on immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and Africa. Asians and Arabs were denied citizenship.

Not until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon Johnson at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, did most measures of the 1924 law become obsolete.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new and powerful symbol of America’s relationship to the “huddled masses” entered into competition with the legendary image of Lady Liberty lifting her lamp. The United States-Mexico border wall has cast a shadow on this monument to freedom and a welcoming democracy.

The European Union has also been busy putting up walls and the most recent began to rise in July 2015 when Hungary undertook the construction of a fence along its border with Serbia. So far, it has not stopped the flow of refugees from Syria, Eritrea, Iraq or Afghanistan, but this wall has become a symbol of the deep divisions among the 28 members of the European Union during what is the world’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

To summarize some of the important events of the past month, on September 7th, Germany pledged over 6 billion dollars for the cost and care of the 800,000 refugees the country expects to receive by the end of 2015; yet on September 14th, it reinstated border controls, abolished within the EU by the Schengen Agreement of 1995. Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands soon followed suit.

Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia have voiced a preference for Christian refugees, whereas Hungary has begun denying all asylum requests.

France has pledged to accept 24,000 refugees this year, but this quota is not being filled. Refugees prefer Germany or Sweden to France, “the country of human rights,” which inscribed the right to asylum in its Constitution of 1793.

Rumors travel fast in today’s world, even among refugees. France has become identified with dirty and dangerous refugee camps, too much unemployment, too much bureaucracy, and a nationalist far-right party, the National Front, whose power and influence is on the rise.

As for how France sees itself, I’d say the nation is anxious and doubtful about its identity and place in the world.

Many of the French fear their country cannot afford to welcome thousands of refugees. With the largest Muslim population of all of Europe, estimated at around 6 million, they also fear that more Muslims would pose a permanent threat to French identity. And with a large population of citizens and legal residents who are unemployed, some who are homeless or living in substandard housing, voices are being raised to ask why the country is not taking care of its own first.

Putting into practice what some EU nations have stated as a preference, the mayors of the French cities of Belfort and Roanne have publicly announced their intention to accept only Christian refugees.

As the migration crisis is taking on the tone of a religious conflict, I’d like to conclude with the thoughts of some experts in the field:

Pope Francis has chosen as his mission to build bridges where there are walls. World leaders, please take note.

Former Pope Benedict XVI provides a clear definition of refugees: “All migrants are human beings who possess fundamental and inalienable rights that must be respected by all and at all times.”

He also reminds us that Islamism is not Islam: “Religion is disfigured when put in the service of ignorance, prejudice, violence, scorn and abuse. In such cases, we observe not only a perversion of religion, but corruption of human freedom, a narrowing and blinding of the spirit,” adding that “such an outcome can be prevented.”

As for Jesus, he would feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty and invite the stranger into his home.

It has never been easy to be a migrant. Nor is it easy to welcome the stranger with open arms: a difficult challenge and food for thought in these challenging times.

“Days Gone By” in Sicily

I started reading The Republican Herald soon after I learned to read. Back in those days, it was still The Pottsville Republican and it arrived in the late afternoon, just in time for a quick read before the evening meal. “The Republican” was part of our family and in my mother’s 91 years of life, there was hardly a day she did not hold “the paper” in her hands.

As a young reader, I skipped the long articles on the front page. Instead, I immediately turned to the editorial page, where I found “this day in history,” which provided me with my first lessons in historical chronology.

Next I turned to my favorite column, “Days Gone By,” events that, for the most part, took place in the region 100, 75, 50 or 25 years ago. I was a little girl, not yet ten years old, and I had to make a considerable mental leap to travel so far back in time.

Even 25 years required effort. The entries were about soldiers coming and going from a terrible war, followed by the war’s end and the soldiers’ return home. 1970 marked the 25th anniversary of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. My father was in a boat off the coast of Japan when the first atomic bomb dropped, but that event seemed as distant to me as Noah and the Flood.

Travelling 100 years back in time was harder still. I had to cross from one century to another, to another war, one that took place close to home. My father, a Civil War buff, took us to Gettysburg and Antietam, where I learned the blood flowed ankle-deep.

At Gettysburg, we climbed Little Round Top. I even have a vague memory of laying eyes on the last Civil War veteran alive, a decrepit old man shrunken to the size of a boy, dressed in an over-sized Union uniform, slumped in a wheelchair.

Over fifty thousand soldiers died at the Battle of Gettysburg, yet there was only one civilian death. We visited the modest house where it took place. Reaching out a hand, touching the table where Jennie Wade was kneading bread when a stray bullet found its way to her heart, I could feel her presence and no Civil War death seemed as real to me as hers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time, battles and vestiges of the past ever since I returned from a week in Sicily, a trip I took with my nephew Louis Graup of Auburn, about to enter his senior year as a math major at Temple University. We travelled all over the western part of the island, documenting our movements in photos: “We saw you at” Agrigento, Selinunte, Segesta, among the temples and ruins of cities built over 2,500 years ago.

As when I was a child reading “Days Gone By,” I had to let go of my narrow notions of time to plunge into the past. At Selinunte, in southwestern Sicily, I crossed a vast plateau overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, walking streets first laid out in the 7th century BCE. To the north stretch olive groves and dry fields where sheep graze. To the south, about 220 miles across the sea, lies the city of Tunis in Africa.

About 2,500 years ago, Selinunte was a thriving city with 30,000 Greek citizens and probably just as many slaves. On one plateau lay the market place and the acropolis, the city’s center of power; on another, across a river flowing into the sea, the Greeks built their temples, monumental structures in the Doric style made of the local golden stone.

Starting in the 8th century BCE, the Greeks arrived to colonize Sicily, at the same time as the Phoenicians who set sail from Carthage, near to present-day Tunis.

At Selinunte Greeks and Carthaginians clashed more than once. In 409 BCE, invading troops from Carthage killed over 16,000 inhabitants and conquered the city. It was also a battleground of the First Punic War, which ended in 241 BCE. Towards the war’s end, the Carthaginians, who retained control of Selinunte, destroyed the city when they could no longer defend it.

Louis and I visited the remains of other Greek cities, some more magnificent than Selinunte, but nowhere else did I feel so strongly the destructive forces of man and time. Massive columns, broken or leaning to one side, some still standing tall, rise to the sky, the last defenders of past glory. Everywhere there is rubble, a mixture of stone and terra cotta, fragments of the homes where people once lived and of the utensils they once used.

Time and nature have done their work at Selinunte but there is also the violence of man leaving his destructive mark on history.

Protected from the beating sun by a parasol, Louis and I could contemplate this destruction from our lounge chairs on the beach at Marinella di Selinunte, a small resort a few steps from the ruins. Walking along the shoreline, we could see the remains of Selinunte’s largest temple dedicated to the goddess Hera.

After sunset, we forgot the past for a while. Along the main street of Marinella, a few bars blasted Italian pop music. In the relative cool of the evening, families, couples and groups of young people came out to stroll. Restaurants were crowded and Louis and I enjoyed a delicious pizza on the terrace of our hotel. For dessert, we had juicy slices of “anguria,” watermelon.

Everywhere we travelled in Sicily, we had to juggle with time, bounding back and forth between millenniums, constantly confronted with what happened, 2,500, 2,000, 1,000 or 500 years ago. We also encountered the influence of early Christians from Constantinople, of Iraqi Muslims who arrived via Tunis in the 9th century, of the French, the Spanish and the Germans, and finally of a united Italy, thanks to Garibaldi, the great unifier of the Italian people, who arrived on the island in 1860.

During our trip to Sicily, my childhood practice of time-travel, picked up while reading “The Republican,” was an indispensable skill. Yet, I’ll admit, at times Sicily was too much for me.

We spent our last days in Palermo. This city is at once majestic, breathtakingly beautiful, decadent, dirty and at times downright ugly. Hot, humid, crowded, and enveloped in tantalizing mystery, it is the fitting symbol of an island that, despite thousands of years of outside influences, remains a world, and a law, onto itself.